Last week, a day after The New York Times reported many years’ worth of sexual-harassment allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, another alarming report appeared, this one in Science magazine. The setting was different—Antarctic research expeditions, not Hollywood—but the narrative was the same. A man, well aware of his position of power, had preyed on women in his field, and his behavior had gone unchecked for years.

According to Science, Boston University is investigating sexual-harassment allegations against David Marchant, an Antarctic geologist and now department chair at the school, brought by two women, his former graduate students. The women say Marchant verbally and physically harassed them during research expeditions in Antarctica two decades ago. Science writer Meredith Wadman reported that documents related to the case suggest Marchant denies the allegations.

For young scientists, research expeditions are important experiences and career builders. They are, in some ways, workplaces like any other in a male-dominated industry, which means they are not immune to sexual harassment. In a 2014 survey of field scientists, 64 percent of respondents said they had personally experienced sexual harassment during their work, and 20 percent reported they were sexually assaulted. But the nature of field work can amplify the damaging effects of sexual harassment, particularly at very remote sites, where there’s little to no communication to the outside world. The distance from reality can become both physical and emotional. The feeling of helplessness that comes with abuse is magnified. In the moment, victims may, quite literally, have nowhere to turn.

One set of allegations against Marchant came from a small expedition in Antarctica’s Beacon Valley, where people slept in unheated tents, traversed rugged terrain, and received supplies by helicopter, Science reported. For weeks, their only contact with others was a radio connection to a base station. Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, alleges that during this trip Marchant, then her thesis adviser, called her a “slut” and a “whore” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was with them. Willenbring said Marchant told her each day, “Today I’m going to make you cry.”

Another woman, whom Science does not name, alleges that during a different expedition in Antarctica, Marchant belittled her and called her a “bitch” repeatedly. “I began to believe the things he told me,” she wrote in a formal complaint.

In some cases, Marchant’s harassment was violent, Willenbring said. She alleges Marchant shoved her, threw rocks at her when she urinated in the field, and:

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

The details of these allegations are shocking in their vulgarity. But the fact that they exist isn’t surprising at all, said Julienne Rutherford, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and one of the authors of the 2014 survey. Rutherford said the accounts of sexual harassment, in both the Weinstein and Marchant reports, read like a script, carefully constructed from similar stories over the years. She described it from the perspective of the alleged perpetrator.

“You identify the target as wanting something you control. You break them down to the point that they don’t trust themselves. You break them down to the point where their work suffers. And you isolate them to the point that they either don’t report, or when they do report, they’re told, wouldn’t it be better if you kept this to yourself?” Rutherford said. “It’s the same story over and over again, and it’s devastating every time.”

On a remote research expedition, there may be no option to report the harassment immediately. The person in charge might be the abuser. Witnesses to the abuse may feel powerless in the moment, perhaps fearful of making themselves targets.

The trauma of the harassment follows victims from the field to their homes and institutions. Avoiding their harassers may be difficult. According to a followup report from Rutherford and her 2014 coauthors on victims, published online Wednesday, “these interactions occurred on their university campuses, at conferences, or online, and a few targets of harassment received love letters even after repeatedly rebuffing the advances of their colleagues.”

Some victims fear career-ending retribution if they report the abuse. The anonymous woman in Science alleges Marchant threatened to keep her from getting research funding. Willenbring said she waited to file her complaint against Marchant until after she received tenure last year, fearing reprisal for describing the events of the field work. “It could be traumatizing to even look at the data” from a trip, said Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Santa Clara University and Rutherford’s coauthor. Entire careers can be abandoned.

Then there are the fears of not being believed. “There still seems to be a fair amount of questioning of these victims, unless the cases are really egregious,” said Meredith Hastings, an associate professor at Brown University who is part of a national project to prevent sexual harassment in earth-sciences fields.

Reports of sexual harassment by male scientists, well-known and respected in their fields, have emerged in recent years in several areas of research, from astronomy to infectious disease, with many instances going unchecked for decades. The bad behavior is discussed quietly and discreetly in a whisper network, where women trade anecdotes and warnings about male advisers or professors or researchers. They exchange stories, advising their colleagues about who’s inappropriate, who’s handsy, and who should be avoided at all costs.

The recent spate of sexual-harassment stories will not be the last, in science and in Hollywood. Similar abuses have happened before, whether in a hotel room or a research camp, and they will happen again. The ones yet to come will prompt outrage, as these have, but they shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“This is common. This is not isolated behavior,” Rutherford said. “These are not a few bad apples. These are examples of systematic campaigns of abuse against junior people.”

About the Author

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”